Wednesday, December 17, 2014

A Festival of Fried, Part II: The Eighteenth Century

Let’s rejoin our story in the session we did with Emma Barker, who led us through a discussion of Fried’s intervention into eighteenth
century French painting. Barker stressed that an abiding methodological lesson
has been introduced into studies of the period through Fried’s insistence on
taking historical art criticism seriously—in reading it holistically, treating
it as an object to be explained, not simply cherry-picking for choice quotes that
illustrate points in an anecdotal way. In this mood, Fried critiques historians
who have dismissed the significance of the re-assertion of the hierarchy of
genres and the central importance of history painting as operating under
anachronistic prejudice (TSF, 545). He argues instead that these concerns were
central to a historical revolt against the Rococo ca. 1750, led by philosophe Denis Diderot. (TSF, 551)
What is crucial for Diderot in Fried’s reading is the concentration of energy
and expression not only by a new-found insistence on unity within painting (TSF
559), but a commensurate demand for constraint within a single temporal instant
of the narrative depicted. As he puts it: “The new emphasis on unity and
instantaneousness was by its very nature an emphasis on the tableau, the
portable and self-sufficient picture that could be taken in all at once as
opposed to the ‘environmental,’ architecture-dependent, often episodic
decorative project [favored by the Rococo] that could not.” (TSF 566) In this
sense, the developments he traces in the essays that would culminate in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) are
understood as anti-Rococo and particular to France. (A&T, 1-2)

This concentration on the tableau format also moved with a
new kind of self-consciousness about the painter’s enterprise—a withering
intolerance for signs of the painter’s meretricious catering to the beholder
for whom the picture was made. So, at once, “a painting had to call to someone,
bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spell bound and
unable to move.” (TSF 570) Yet, to do so successfully, the painter had to
accomplish “the supreme fiction that the beholder did not exist, that he was
not really there, standing before the canvas.” (TSF, 581) Fried’s name for the
privileged means of achieving Diderot’s mandate is, of course, “absorption,”
which he defines as “the state or condition of rapt attention, of being
completely occupied or engrossed or (as I prefer to say) absorbed in what he or
she is doing, hearing, thinking, feeling.” (AMTFP, 143) Chardin is an important
figure in Fried’s account of this absorptive aesthetic—which turns out to
extend back to seventeenth century figures including Caravaggio, Poussin,
Vermeer and Rembrandt (AMTFP, 165)—insofar as he was able to fulfill Diderot’s
brief, as it were, naively. He depicts everyday scenes in which figures appeared
so absorbed in their activities that they turn away from or simply ignore the
beholder. “In Chardin’s canvases the persuasive representation of absorption
appears to have been achieved, to have come about naturally, almost
automatically, in and through the objective representation of ordinary
absorptive states and activities.” (AMTFP, 172-3) Relations between this kind
of aesthetic and the drive for “presentness” are certainly there for the
taking. In Chardin:

The very stability and
unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as
material properties that could not be otherwise but as manifestations of an
absorptive state—the image’s absorption in itself, so to speak that only
happens to subsist. … [We see] a single moment … isolated in all its plenitude
and density from an absorptive continuum the full extent of which the painting
masterfully evokes. Images such as these are not of time wasted but of time filled (as a glass may be filled not
just to the level of the rim but slightly above). (A&T, 50-1)

Pictures like these, Fried continues, visualize “an
unofficial morality according to which absorption emerges as good in and of
itself, without regard to its occasion; or perhaps it is simply that Chardin
found in the absorption of his figures both a natural correlative for his own
engrossment in the act of painting and a proleptic mirroring of what he trusted
would be the absorption of the beholder before the finished work.” (A&T,
51)

Natural and automatic as his efforts appear to Fried,
Chardin is also a transitional figure. In this way, it is Greuze—Chardin’s
inferior successor, as typically judged by modern standards—who is actually
more important to Fried’s story. For, where Chardin can simply, naively
overcome the primordial theatricality of all painting simply by posing his
depicted figures as turned away from or otherwise ignoring the beholder, Greuze
has to achieve those effects and does so by initiating a program of visual
drama. Only by contriving events of such heightened emotional and sentimental
drama can Greuze achieve the unity demanded by Diderot whereby all figures will
remain locked into the concerns proper to the painted world that they won’t be
drawn out by the tractor beam of the beholder looking at them. From Greuze
onward, “the dramatic representation of action and passion, and the causal and
instantaneous mode of unity that came with it, provided the best available
medium for establishing that fiction in the painting itself.” (TSF, 581) Although
Fried is consistently hostile to the construal of modernism as reduction (see
HMW, 221-2), he does cast the shift from Chardin to Greuze ca. 1750 this way:
“The everyday as such was in an important sense lost to pictorial
representation around that time. The latter was a momentous event, one of the
first in the series of losses that together constitute the ontological basis of
modern art.” (AMTFP, 174)

Now, a program of contriving pictorial unity and drama
sufficiently powerful that it will stop a beholder dead in her tracks, but that
has the effect of ignoring the beholder that the picture is designed to attract
all traffics in what Fried variously calls “paradox.” (See TSF, 581; AMTFP, 174)
In his critical writing on Diderot, literary theorist Jay Caplan usefully draws
out the centrality of paradox to the philosophe’s
thought and his preference for the literary form of the dialogue. (FN, 4) “Only
in dialogue—in the shifting movements of conversation and dialogic
confrontation,” as Caplan puts it, “could he find a sense of his own identity,
as well as approach the fleeting object of his thought.” (FN, 7) One of the
paradoxical operations that Caplan sees in Diderot’s thought turns around the
structure of the tableau (considered here as a literary device, informed by the
experience of eighteenth century painting), which so impresses a reader that
she is compelled to recount the scene repetitively. In this sense, the reader
“plays what is literally a part, a fragment; he aims to replace a part that the
tableau has lost … as if by accumulating partial images, one could suggest that
the tableau is and always has been whole.” (FN, 17-18) A fragment that stands
in place of the recognition of difference, the tableau is thus construed as a
fetish “in which the transitoriness of the real world is magically transformed
into an ideal fixity.” (FN, 18) A reading like this has clear implication for
Fried’s account of Chardin’s filled instances noted above.

Caplan, however, also introduces a second framework for
understanding the tableau and its screening of difference. Noting the ways in
which Diderot’s literary tableaux frequently take their poignancy from
highlighting the loss of a family member, Caplan turns to a language of
sacrifice to explain the dialectical chain-reaction these passages provoke:

These tableaux express a desire for
reconciliation, a desire to make up for what the family has lost. However, that
loss or absence is always implicitly replaced by a silent beholder who
identifies with the suffering of the virtuous family members and must
vicariously fill in for those who have departed. In this manner, what has been
sacrificed in a now-fragmented family—the missing part—reappears outside the tableau in the figure of the
beholder. When he sees the tableau … the beholder makes a sacrifice equivalent
to the original one, to the ‘making sacred’ of a family member. (FN, 22)

So, as the reader/beholder of the tableau sacrifices himself
with his own sympathetic sense of loss even as he thereby reconciles the
wholeness of the represented situation, Caplan identifies a structural
difference between Diderot’s literary works and the paintings analyzed by
Fried.He puts it this way: “The
tableau is always minus one. Diderot’s written tableaux are therefore
structured differently from the contemporary paintings that Michael Fried has
so brilliantly analyzed. In the written tableau, a loss inside the tableau
constitutes the beholder outside it.” (FN, 23)

Although I am not entirely convinced by Caplan’s reading, I
think the introduction of sacrifice is highly productive for understanding the
emotional drama of Greuze and for apprehending the broader stakes of Fried’s
writings on eighteenth century French painting. In class, we used a catalyst
from Georges Bataille, an excerpt from his short essay called “Sacrifice, the Festival and the
Principles of the Sacred World.”[1]
What is crucial to Bataille’s account of sacrifice is that the ritual violently
pulls entities from the profane, utilitarian economies of production in an
excessive act that releases them into sacred immanence. Sacrifice, then, is a
lacerating rupture of individuation that restores the sacred order of community
and its connections with the holy:

To sacrifice is not to kill but to
relinquish and to give. ... What is important is to pass from a lasting order,
in which all consumption of resources is subordinated to the need for duration,
to the violence of an unconditional consumption; what is important is to leave
a world of real things, whose reality derives from a long-term operation and
never resides in the moment—a world that creates and preserves (that creates
for the benefit of a lasting reality). [...] Sacrifice is made of objects that
could have been spirits, such as animals or plant substances, but that have
become things and that need to be restored to the immanence whence they come,
to the vague sphere of lost intimacy. (S, 213)

Remembering how he stresses that objects of sacrifice are
conventionally utilitarian objects and not luxury goods, Bataille’s account is
particularly illuminating when we turn back to Greuze. Emma Barker herself
argues that Greuze’s pictures of young girls apparently mourning a loss of
chastity and their implied paternal beholder (see below) need to be situated in relation to
the “social practice of the exchange of women, as it has been theorized first
by Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequently by feminist scholars.” (RGG, 99) In the
deeply patriarchal society of ancien
régime France, Barker argues, “the deflowering of an unmarried girl was not
so much a sin against her chastity … as an offence against the authority of her
father.” (RGG, 99) Since women were regarded legally as objects to be
negotiated on a marriage market, sexual activity constituted a crime against
property, a violation of a utilitarian object.

Hence its drama. Per Bataille, the loss registered in the
weeping of Greuze’s young girls marks the sacrifice of their economic function
on a profane marriage market through a rupture of their commodity status, their
objecthood. Yet, this kind of operation is precisely what Fried seems to have
in mind with Diderot’s aesthetics and anti-theatrical painting writ large. The
new insistence on the beholder in France ca. 1750, he argues:

directs attention to the
problematic character not only of the painting-beholder relationship of
something more fundamental—the object­-beholder
(one is almost tempted to say object-subject)
relationship which the painting-beholder relationship epitomizes. It suggests
that by the middle of the eighteenth century in France the object-beholder
relationship as such, the very condition of spectatordom, had emerged as
theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of access to truth
and conviction. The essential task of the painter as construed by Diderot … was
to undo that state of affairs, to de-theatricalize
beholding and so make it once again a medium of absorption, sympathy and
self-transcendence. (TSF, 581)

Transcending the individuated self, the false opposition of
subjecthood and objecthood: surely these are goals reconcilable with Bataille’s
notion of sacrifice. But, they are also deeply continuous with the religious
fervor of “Art and Objecthood”—its opening appeal to the thought of
fire-and-brimstone Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards (author of the famous
sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) and Fried’s revulsion at
minimalist work that “makes the
beholder a subject and the piece in question … an object” (A&O, 154), to
say nothing of the concluding line, “Presentness is grace.” (A&O, 168)
Indeed, one of the most productive observations made by Emma Barker in class
was that we should take this capacity of bourgeois society for the sacred
seriously since it helped to produce nothing less than the French Revolution.

By this account, then, what we see in Greuze’s supposedly
melodramatic, saccharine and otherwise embarrassing excursions into
sentimentalism are really mechanisms for restoring a sacred order through art,
which had been made necessary by the advent of new techniques of the self. I
think this is what Fried means when he concludes one of the preliminary essays
towards A&T this way: “If one
asks why beholding or spectatordom emerged as problematic and specifically
theatrical in France around the middle of the eighteenth century, one cannot
expect an answer in terms of painting alone. For what underlay that development
was at once a new conscious of the self and a new experience of the role of
beholding in the stabilizing (and undermining) of that consciousness. The
ultimate sources of the theatricalization of beholding must be sought in the
social, political, and economic reality of the age—in all that bears on the
history of the self.” (TSF, 583)[2]
This strikes me as one of the really productive sites for exploring Fried’s
vision of the moral in modernism in relation to the thought of Michel Foucault
and those who have built upon his work. But, I’ll save the elaboration on this
point for another time.

[1] This was not
entirely capricious on my part, as Caplan too references Bataille directly
before the passages quote above, albeit in a different context; FN, 21.

[2] This, of
course, is a fascinatingly different account from the dogmatism of A&T itself, where we read: “Nowhere
in the pages that follow is an effort made to connect the art and criticism
under discussion with the social, economic, and political reality of the age.”
(A&T, 4)

Abbreviations for works cited:

TSFMichael
Fried, “Toward a Supreme Fiction: Genre and Beholder in the Art Criticism of
Diderot and His Contemporaries,” New Literary History 6, 3 (1975):
543-585

[1] This was not
entirely capricious on my part, as Caplan too references Bataille directly
before the passages quote above, albeit in a different context; FN, 21.

[2] This, of
course, is a fascinatingly different account from the dogmatism of A&T itself, where we read: “Nowhere
in the pages that follow is an effort made to connect the art and criticism
under discussion with the social, economic, and political reality of the age.”
(A&T, 4)